How To Design Your Life

Why am I here?

What am I doing?

Why does it matter?

What is my purpose?

What’s the point of it all?

Designing Your Life is a way for you to figure out your own answers to these perennial questions, and to figure out your own good life.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]A well-designed life is a life that makes sense. It’s a life in which who you are, what you believe, and what you do all line up together.–Bill Burnett.[/perfectpullquote]

Think like a designer

If you are not a designer, you’ll ask: And how does a designer think?

Designers don’t think. Designers build.

So it means that if you want to design your life, you’re not going to be dreaming up of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world, but you are going to build things, try stuff, and have a lot of fun in the process.

Ayse Birsel is chief Deconstruction:Reconstruction officer. As co-founder of Birsel + Seck, she strives to design a life people will love. In Design The Life You Love, she shares her story.

I used to be a designer of products but now I am designer of life. I put aside an hour every day to think and not judge what I was doing.

Deconstructing is breaking something apart so you are delinking and breaking the preconceptions so that you can develop a point of view and as you shift your point of view you can see things from a different perspective which you can then reconstruct as a new value system.

If I design my life maybe I can build more coherence and align myself with my values. That is really often what happens.

Your life is your most important project so why don’t you do it creatively?

Your design tools: Five mind-sets

1. Be Curious. Curiosity makes anything new. It invites exploration.

2. Try stuff. Designers try things. They embrace change.

3. Reframe problems. Reframing is essential to finding the right problems and the right solutions.

4. Know it’s a process. Life design is a journey; let go of the end goal and focus on the process.

5. Radical collaboration. You aren’t alone in the process.

Building your compass

We need two things in order to build our compass:

(1) A workview. What’s work for you? Why do you do it? What makes good work good?

(2) A lifeview. What gives life meaning? What makes your life worthwile or valuable? How does your life relate to others in your family, your community, and the world? What do money, fame, and personal accomplishment have to do with a satisfying life? How important are experience, growth, and fulfillment in your life?

Now, answer the following questions:

• Where do your views on work and life complement one another?
• Where do they clash?
• Does one drive the other? How?

The health – work – play – love dahsboard

Think for a moment of the gauges on your car’s dashboard.

Do you have enough gas to complete your journey?

So you are going to assess your state of health, and the ways you work, play, and love.

Knowing the current status of your health, work, play, love dahsboard gives you a framework and some data about yourself, all in one place. Only you know what’s good enough or not good enough–right now.